Americanisms

This is my first week back at school after a wonderful vacation at home back in the States. I came back refreshed from my time off. I also came back refreshed in a literal fashion, I remembered to bring back my space-age water bottle (courtesy of Nance).

One of my New Years resoultions was to get back in the habit of drinking water, a habit that I had before coming here, a habit that I am now going to get back into because I have my awesome PURPLE water bottle!

I wasn´t sure about carrying my water bottle around to the classes, but then I remembered that I had seen several teachers hydrating themselves in a similar fashion. So I figured, no big deal! Yeah right.

I was under the impression that the students thought I was drinking alcohol or something along those lines, because everyone kept asking me what it was, why do you have it, how does it come out? They were more interested in my water bottle than in anything else I had to share with them.

It was later explained to me that they just don´t make water bottles like this in Spain! I haven´t really been looking, but I will take their word for it. I suppose it makes sense, because I used this water bottle when I was student teaching, and the students thought nothing of it. I actually think one of the students may have owned a waterbottle herself!

Regardless, it was rather comical to see this reaction to my water bottle. Being an American, I suppose I miss out on identifying a lot of things that are "American" such as this water bottle. I didn´t think that it would get all that attention considering all it does is keep me hydrated. I mean, it got more of a reaction than anything else from home that I have brought here. Maybe the Spainards would drink more water if they had cool water bottles such as this one!

(Picture to come soon!)

My second "Whoa I should step back and think about this for a second" moment was when we were discussing carnivals and traditions in different populations in my 4th grade class. I explained that two American traditions are Thanksgiving (or pavo, pavo, pavo as they knew it) and July 4th which is also called Independence Day. I explained to the students that this day is

celebrated by all Americans with barbeques, and fireworks (that drawing was incredible by the way). I went on the notion that the students would understand the word Independence Day considering its a cognate, but I didn´t pause to explain the history.

Florencio jumped in and gave more background to the students about the explorers and India and how they landed on a new continent instead. He related it to some of the student´s countries (Ecuador, Peru, etc...) and talked about colonies of Spain versus England. I thought it was a very good, concise explanation of a complicated history. He obviously didn´t go into details as to why we fought for our independence, but the students got the gist. Anyways, he also explained that at one point all the students were immigrants as those from the USA, and that Spain wasn´t always what it is today. I am not going to go into those details, but that is a crucial difference between Spain and the USA. The USA has a much shorter history than that of Spain, and Spain was clearly not discovered by Christopher Columbus, but rather they funded his exploration.

The purpose of this short history lesson is that while I knew and understood this history, I never thought to back it up and explain it to my students. I am glad Florencio was in there to point that out, because I just got up on my high horse and not give the background of our nation´s history.

Lesson learned for me and for the students. Despite having some similarities, most of the differences are more noticeable between Spain and the USA. I still am baffled that more of the students were interested in relating the difference in water bottles to me rather than the history of our countries, but I´ll take it. Whatever floats their boat!